What the critics said about the best new books: The Middle-Class Millionaire: The Rise of the New Rich and How They Are Changing America; and Embryo: A Defense of Human Life
The middling rich may be the most powerful group in America, say authors Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff. True, the 8.4 million families in this demographic aren’t capable of endowing graduate schools in their own names or blanketing a battleground state with attack ads against their least favorite candidate for president. Their power instead lies in their numbers. These self-made Americans, who have assets of $1 million to $10 million, couldn’t imagine calling themselves anything but “middle class.” They send their children to public schools and choose where to live accordingly. They plugged into TiVo and Grey Goose vodka early, thereby convincing plenty of truly middle-class Americans that they should, too. They don’t concern themselves much with the greater good. They don’t have time; they work an average of 70 hours a week.
Prince and Schiff contend that those left looking up at the “middle-class millionaire” households shouldn’t be jealous, said Mark Egan in Reuters. According to the authors’ surveys, working millionaires separate themselves from the herd through four traits that many middle-class Americans eschew. Besides being willing to blow well past the 40-hour workweek, these hard-chargers make riskier professional choices, brush off failures, and view personal acquaintances as a form of capital. Prince and Schiff probably hope that their study subjects see all this as flattering, said Janet Maslin in TheNew York Times. The rest of us won’t be fooled. Clearly, the middle-class millionaire is that aggressive name-dropper from last night’s cocktail party, “the guy who, on his daily two-hour bike ride, annoys his friends by taking constant phone calls as he pedals.”
Prince and Schiff’s “valuable if formulaic” book cogently explains why the market power of “MCMs” exceeds their numbers, said James Pressley in Bloomberg.com. Because the merely wealthy are more numerous than the super-wealthy, many products and services are tailored to them. Because they rub elbows with the actual middle class, their aspirations become America’s aspirations. The biggest question—“What’s it all for?”—is never broached, said Keith Whitaker in The Wall Street Journal. “The authors hold
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up Benjamin Franklin as the first MCM.” But Franklin devoted his life to science and politics after he’d accumulated his wealth. “It is hard to imagine the achievers in The Middle-Class Millionaire doing any such thing.”
Embryo: A Defense of Human Life
by Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen
(Doubleday, $24)
Science dictates that the moral rights of every human being must begin at conception, say professors Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen. The findings of contemporary embryology are clear. An embryo is not “a mere clump of cells awaiting some magical transformation.” The one-cell zygote produced the moment sperm fertilizes egg is instead “a whole living member of the species Homo sapiens in the earliest stage of his or her development.” Skeptics may argue that twinning alone proves this conclusion wrong; any organism capable of splitting in two, they would say, lacks a definitive identity until that possibility passes. But even when twinning occurs, the process starts from an embryo that is already a complete organism, fully programmed to become a fetus and then an infant.
Give these two Catholic authors credit for trying to draw such a bold moral line, said Nancy Gibbs in Time. Thanks to advances in biotechnology, embryos are being created and stored by countless couples and stem-cell researchers around the globe, and there are no easy answers about who decides their fates. Embryo is “a difficult book to read,” full of scientific and philosophical jargon, said Christopher Willcox in The New York Sun. Still, the authors have performed “a valuable public service” by offering such a detailed argument for their brand of reproductive absolutism. They not only wish to end abortion, they argue against any research on or reproduction of embryos that results in their destruction.
Unfortunately, the bold line that the authors would like drawn at conception does not exist in nature, said William Saletan in Slate.com. Twinning isn’t the only complication of embryonic development that they fail to adequately address. Research indicates that as much as half of the cellular material in every zygote at conception becomes not a fetus but a placenta. The authors’ pretense of scientific objectivity also occasionally gives way to questionable moral arguments, said Emily Bazelon in The Washington Post. At one point, George and Tollefsen claim that if a woman caught in a burning building had to choose between saving a 5-year-old girl and a crate of her own embryos, no one would label her immoral if she chose the crate. “Really?”
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